Donald Stump, Spenser’s Heavenly Elizabeth: Providential History in ‘The Faerie Queene’. Queenship and Power Series, ed. by Charles Beem and Carole Levin. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. xv + 337 pp. ISBN: 9783030271145. £59.99 hardback.
In a moment when undergraduates are invited to mine The Faerie Queene for instances of its culture’s centering of whiteness, patriarchy, and Protestantism, Stump’s book takes us on a leisurely ramble in the opposite direction. Rather than ask, ‘What does The Faerie Queene say about twenty-first-century century concerns?’, Stump asks, ‘What did Spenser design The Faerie Queene to say to his contemporaries about late sixteenth-century concerns?’
Stump is aware that his Old Historicist project is well out of the mainstream. Recalling A.C. Hamilton’s demonstration in The Structure of Allegory in ‘The Faerie Queene’, ‘that Book I can be read as an allegory of the Russian Revolution’ (16), he admits that historicist interpretations can seem ‘random and contrived’ (15) and ‘highly selective’ (16). Hamilton considered them a distraction from the poem’s ‘“moral or spiritual”’ teaching (16), but Stump counters that Spenser ‘invoke[d] ethical quandaries encountered at the highest levels of [Elizabethan] government’ (16) precisely to teach morality and spirituality. Spenser used sixteenth-century English concerns, Stump argues in his first chapter, to teach sixteenth-century English readers universal truths.
Stump’s second chapter, ‘Spenser, Elizabeth, and the Problem of Flattery’, establishes that the education Spenser received, both religious and classical, taught him and his learned contemporaries to ‘[scorn] flattery’ (38). He notes that Spenser reproved as well as praised his queen and argues, by extension from Amoretti, that it is possible to be critical of a lady (as the poet-lover is of his beloved in the early sonnets) and at the same time idealize her: ‘It is not flattery but habitual, deeply engrained neo-Platonic Christianity that is reflected in his characterization of his future wife as “heauenly”’ (56). Likewise, Queen Elizabeth, seen from a neo-Platonic standpoint, reflected the divine glory while being an imperfect woman.
I was surprised that Thomas Cain’s thesis in Praise in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (a book Stump cites freely in subsequent chapters) did not figure in Chapter Two. Cain, one recalls, claims that Spenser made use of the strategy, acknowledged by classical orators as well as Christian humanists, of praising the virtues you wished your listener to adopt as if he or she already possessed them. Likewise, Stump’s willingness to take Elizabethan texts as unmediated revelations of Elizabethan mental experience gave me occasional pause. For instance, he quotes Ulpian Fulwell’s Ars Adulandi, the Arte of Flatterie to identify flattery as ‘“a filthie fountain”’, flatterers as ‘“the most pernicious of all tame beastes”’, and those who listen to them as ‘“sink[ing] in the stinking puddle of folly”’ (39). Stump posits that Fulwell’s language reflects ‘widespread attitudes of his age’ (39), but it also echoes well-worn tropes from texts as familiar as the First Book of Homilies’ ‘Against whoredom and adultery’, where ‘the synne of whoredom’, not flattery, is ‘that most fylthy lake, foule puddle and stynkyng synke, wherinto all kyndes of synnes and evils flow’.[1] One might imagine that Fulwell, rather than giving voice to a deeply-felt Elizabethan concern, is speaking in his character as a former clergyman, or even recycling sermon notes. (My own sense is that reading sermons preached at the Elizabethan court or on Accession Day would offer solace to anyone worried that flattery might be a problem in The Faerie Queene.)
In Chapter 3, ‘Gloriana, Biblical Typology, and Moral Transfiguration’, Stump explains that, just as the Hebrew Scriptures ‘foreshadowed later events’ (79), so Spenser wrote ‘The Faerie Queene [as] a national foundation myth about a chosen people that is designed to foreshadow historical events destined to come to pass centuries later, during the lifetime of Queen Elizabeth (76). I was excited by the insight that Spenser was writing an Old Testament to ‘shadow’ or ‘typify’ his era’s current events (in this analogy, the Gospel). However, Stump explains biblical typology (‘Jacob’s sons are types of the twelve apostles’ [80] and ‘Moses […] foreshadow[s] the life and ministry of Jesus’ [81]) with his own point-by-point comparisons rather than by quoting the Christian Scriptures or Spenser’s contemporaries. Nor does he quote contemporary sources that use biblical ‘types’ in connection with the queen. These missed opportunities leave the impression that Stump is practicing this Christian hermeneutic as much as supporting the claim that Spenser used it to structure the poem. Still, he makes his case; given a mindset that sees faulty humans like Moses and Elijah as foreshadowing the divine Son of God, surely Spenser can, without flattery, celebrate Elizabeth’s glorious fulfilment of her providential role in history by attributing to her a divine effulgence.
The middle section of the book lays out Stump’s reading of The Faerie Queene. In Chapter 4, ‘Una and the English Reformation’, Stump reconsiders and supports the Old Historicist consensus interpretation of Book 1: that it allegorizes the incomplete and vacillating Henrician reforms, the turbulence of the Edwardian and Marian periods, and the triumph of the Elizabethan Settlement. Stump shows how Spenser may have planned for his readers to construe the details of his story: Una’s escape from Satyrane’s protection corresponds to the Princess Elizabeth’s release from Woodstock and resettlement at Hatfield, with Satyrane representing the ‘rural gentry’ rather than any particular historical figure (129); the conflict between Sansloy and Satyrane corresponds to the disorder of Dudley’s Conspiracy of 1556 (129); Orgoglio’s height recalls the two giants who participated in the pageant welcoming Philip of Spain to London (131); the episode of the dragon fight incorporates the specific sequence of events as the Elizabethan Settlement was passed in Parliament and enforced on the bishops (141-49), and so on.
I found the fine-grained historical references in this and the subsequent chapters in this section very interesting, though at times Stump’s voicing of Elizabethan Protestant interpretations of recent history struck me as startlingly direct. For instance, Stump appears to concur with Spenser’s contemporaries in the providentiality of Mary’s fatal illness when he writes, ‘Just as Mary lost England when she allowed her bishops to act like the Spanish Inquisition, so Duessa falls once ‘“her gay garments [are] staynd with filthy gore”’ (137; I.viii.16). Nevertheless, Stump does not insist upon any of his specific interpretations, claiming only that they illuminate and integrate with ‘the larger purposes and dominant effects of the poem’ (156) and account for ‘obvious historical allusions’ while ‘reveal[ing] recurring patterns in human conduct and culture’ (157).
Chapter 5, ‘The Maturation of the Queen’, takes up Books II, III, and IV. In Book II, according to Stump, ‘ethical, political, and psychological issues […] reflect Elizabeth’s preoccupations early in the reign’ (161) as well as continuing the topical allegory. Cymocles and Pyrocles correspond not to specific persons, but to ‘two kinds of recusants’, the ‘fiery’ (like Thomas Percy and Charles Neville) and the ‘more cautious and subservient’ (like Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk [168]). The destruction of the Bower of Bliss corresponds to the ‘official recognition of Mary’s abdication’ and James’s accession to the Scottish throne (168).
Stump claims that Spenser uses Books III and IV to develop in Britomart a counter-factual Elizabeth who ‘will awake and confront her enemies’ (170). Stump sees her rescue of Redcrosse at the house of Malecasta as an allegory of Robert Dudley’s brief forays into the European wars of religion in the early 1560s—efforts which were unsuccessful, but ‘Spenser was determined to praise Elizabeth for acting against her Catholic enemies, however ineffectively’ (173). Belphoebe and Florimell, whose feminine charms create conflicts for which they take no responsibility, criticize Elizabeth’s encouraging of her courtiers to treat her as an object of Petrarchan longing. In any case, as far as Stump is concerned, Timias represents not Ralegh specifically, but a group including him along with Leicester, Hatton, and Essex, all courtly lovers whose desires Elizabeth failed to gratify.
For Stump, the Florimell allegory not only ‘bears on the ethics of love and marriage’ (203-4), but also on the development in England of a trade-based commercial and colonial economy (with Florimell representing older agricultural interests and Marinell the new maritime economic expansion). Britomart’s wounding of Marinell thus represents not only specific incidents like the expulsion of the Dutch Protestant Sea Beggars from the Dover coast in 1572 but also the early tendency Elizabeth manifested to ‘mix marriage negotiations, religious politics, and economic undertakings in ways that complicated all three’ (205). By the early 1590s, when Spenser was presumably writing Book IV, ‘interest in uniting land and sea interests’ were ‘running high’ (208). Stump cites the Elvetham entertainment (which stops short of marrying Neaera to Sylvanus) as well as Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (where the landed Orsino and Olivia unite their fortunes with voyagers Viola and Sebastian). Spenser approved of the movement ‘to establish the new trading economy as a primary center of national development’ (211).
Chapter 6, ‘The Queen in Her Glory’, focuses on Elizabeth’s ‘glory years’, when she ‘stood up to threats from Catholic forces’ (217). Here, Stump suggests that Paridell typifies charismatic Catholic priests embedded in recusant households and suspected of seducing English wives and daughters. While he represents an ethical, genealogical, political, and religious dead end, Britomart challenges him on behalf of a morally earnest Protestantism. Her rescue of Artegall is a turning point in the epic, and from this point of Book V on, Stump finds that Spenser’s figures of Elizabeth celebrate acts of Elizabeth’s maturity: her more militant suppression of Roman Catholicism, engagement with Spain in the Netherlands, and interest in westward expansion.
Book V notoriously misrepresents chronology: Mary Stuart was tried and executed in 1586, before the Armada of 1588, whereas Spenser shows Mary’s death twice: as Britomart dispatches Radigund, and again (after the Souldan episode) as Mercilla approves Duessa’s execution. Stump believes that Spenser supported those lobbying for Mary’s death after the Northern Rebellion and Ridolfi Plot. Thus, the allegory offers, in its identification of adultery and complicity in murder as points at issue in Duessa’s trial, a flashback to concerns of the 1560s and 70s. (The historical Elizabeth had stipulated these concerns as off-limits but Parliament discussed them anyway.) Arthur, here representing the English people, and Artegall, representing the government, agreed to Mary’s execution. Elizabeth resisted her Council and Parliament, but Mercilla allows herself to be guided by their allegorical counterparts.
Stump is also at pains to explain why Spenser represents the Armada so differently from contemporary sources. The victory got much more airplay in Elizabethan England as a defining personal and national achievement than it does in Spenser’s poem, where Arthur is ‘victour of that day’ (V.viii.51) rather than Mercilla, and his conquest of the Souldan is a ‘single noble feat in the life of a warrior who has had many’ (248). Spenser’s version of the story, with Samient’s ill-advised and futile mission (representing Elizabeth’s last-ditch diplomacy) and the improvisation by Arthur and Artegall (representing Elizabeth’s military commanders), shows ‘an isolated and ill-informed queen’ (249) whom Spenser, like Sidney, wished would take her council’s advice.
According to Stump, Spenser wrote Book V in disagreement with some of Elizabeth’s policies without being disillusioned with her. He thus shows Mercilla handling the Spanish threat, the Armada, Mary Stuart, and the Irish and Netherlandish campaigns much as he wished Elizabeth had handled them: namely by modeling the Humanist ideal of monarchy. Thus, Stump claims Book V was designed ‘on behalf of the forward Protestants of the Council and Parliament and against the Queen’ (256). It shows ‘what [Spenser] wanted people to think had happened’, casting ‘his own age’ as ‘the advent of a monarchial republic’ (257).
Stump sees Book VI as reflecting Spenser’s disgust with Elizabeth’s courtiers, rather than with Elizabeth, noting the direct address to and praise for her in the proem and in VI.x. As Book VI does not incorporate historical allusions to Elizabeth, however, Stump quickly moves to the Cantoes of Mutabilitie, noting that there are three representations of the queen: Cynthia, the aging Elizabeth assaulted by Mutabilitie; Diana, a young Elizabeth embodying an eroticized chastity; and Dame Nature, who ‘wield[s] masculine dread while […] enticing […] with feminine allure’ (264), much as Gloriana is fearsome and enticing. The Cantos are thus a poignant farewell to an Elizabeth who is a ‘goddess reflecting light from a higher source into the world’ (266).
In Chapter 7, Stump begins his final section, ‘The Faerie Queene in Context’, with ‘Una, Mercilla, and the Elizabethan Apocalypse’. Noting that many Elizabethan Protestants expected ‘the imminent end of the world’ and that ‘Elizabeth […] shared the sense that the End Times were drawing near’ (274), Stump asks whether Spenser considered Elizabeth to play as pivotal a role in the cosmic drama as Moses, Elijah, David, Peter, Paul, or Constantine. Passing on the opportunity to quote from Spenser’s contemporaries who claimed this for her, Stump notes that Gabriel Harvey recommended Spenser to take Revelation as a model and reminds readers that Nahib Shaheen’s Biblical References in ‘The Faerie Queene’ counts more allusions to Revelation than any other book: Spenser took Harvey’s advice.
Stump observes that The Faerie Queene incorporates two apocalypses, Book I’s and Book V’s. He then carefully compares Redcrosse and the dragons he faces (Errour, Duessa’s beast, and the dragon, one-headed and uncrowned, that menaces Una’s parents) to the Rider on the White Horse and the dragons of Revelation, demonstrating that Redcrosse’s failings show the shortcomings of the English reformers rather than ushering in the millennium. Geryoneo, enemy of Belge in Book V, is a composite of threats from Revelation. Arthur’s rescue alludes to Leicester’s 1585-87 campaign in the Netherlands, but Stump replaces the one-to-one personal correspondence with a broader category, positing Arthur as Spenser’s ‘ideal of the English nation at its best’ (292). The hero still falls short of the Rider on the White Horse, as Belge and her sons do not recover Eden.
Spenser, then, certainly applies themes and details from Revelation to his allegory of Elizabeth’s life and times, but in a way consistent with the spiritual interpretation of Revelation developed by Jerome and Victorinus and adopted by Augustine after the sack of Rome in 410 AD. Revelation, in this view, represents recurring struggles in the battle of good and evil. Spenser saw Revelation as providing patterns and an allegory that fits ‘every age’ (297) and that could thus fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtue and gentle discipline even if the Day of the Lord is not imminent. While other sixteenth-century Protestants claimed that theirs were in fact the End Times, Stump sees Spenser as heeding Jesus’s warning that no one knows the day nor the hour except the Father: Spenser, ‘[l]ike Augustine—and Christ himself—[is] silent on the time and place’ (303). Thus, the poem closes by looking forward to eternity.
In his preface, Stump wonders why, given Spenser’s affinity with and admiration for ‘his literary twin’ Sir Philip Sidney (ix), The Faerie Queene is so different in its attitude toward Elizabeth in comparison to the revision of the Arcadia Sidney left incomplete at his death in 1586. The eighth chapter, ‘Sidney, Spenser, and the Queen’, provides the answer and returns the focus of the volume to worldly concerns: besides differences between Spenser and Sidney in class background, temperament, and audience (Spenser’s print-reading masses vs. Sidney’s aristocratic network), Sidney did not live long enough to see Elizabeth adopt the positions for which he had advocated, especially her military challenges to Spain in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
I am so glad Donald Stump has written and that Palgrave Macmillan has published this book. For those Spenserians who desire, in Stephen Greenblatt’s phrase, to speak with the dead, Stump has given us, in his gracious and assured voice, with his palpable warmth and sweetness, his own mature reflections on what exactly Spenser had to say to his living contemporaries. The referents are largely unfamiliar; the theological shades of thought and nuances of biblical interpretation Stump invokes are debatable even among those who can make out the language. In another generation they will be less familiar, and those who care may be even fewer. But Stump in his generosity has made his best case for both the traditional way of reading and the traditional reading itself. We can be grateful.
Margaret Christian
Penn State Lehigh Valley
[1] Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition, ed. Ronald B. Bond (Toronto: University Toronto Press, 1987), 174-90. I quote from pages 179 and 180.
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Comments
Thank you for your detailed review, Margaret. I would not, though, describe myself as an Old Historicist, being opposed to their obsessively personalizing method and their failure to show the integration of the topical with the more important ethical, theological, political, and psychological allegory. What I did find suggestive in the Variorum, however, was the idea that Spenser was (as he says in the Letter to Ralegh) devising a "continued" topical allegory. The key is not to equate that with a “continuous” allegory of that limited sort. Having spent many years studying and writing about Elizabeth, what surprised me when I returned to The Faerie Queen was how much more about her life and reign the poet includes than I had supposed. Once we recognize that, far from being a flatterer, he holds up a Humanist mirror to his monarch (delicately but candidly revealing her faults as well as her virtues), his six figures for her--from Una to Cynthia--reveal a great deal about her from her days as a princess through the major crises of her reign. He interrogates her policies and actions in diplomacy, war, and economic development as well as her personality and her love relationships--and even her possible role in the Apocalypse that many thought was drawing near. But all is in the service of the other allegorical aims of the poem, and he is far more interested in large factions and points of view than in personalities—with the exception of Elizabeth herself.
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Council and Parliament, but Mercilla allows herself to be guided by their allegorical counterparts.
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